Capitalism and Socialism Quotes

“Today, they are struggling with the deepest recession since the 1930s, a banking system on government life-support and the danger of deflation. How can it have gone so wrong?” – Martin Wolf, economic strategist at the ‘Financial Times’

We have gone to the edge of an abyss that few thought was ever possible. If the world pulls together, we can avoid the Armageddon endgame.” – Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia.

, “Our world is broken – and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it. The compass by which we steered as Americans has gone.” – Bernie Sucher, head of Moscow operations at Merrill Lynch

“There are many questions hanging over global financial markets, but none more pertinent, perhaps, than the following: will the global economy rebound in time to quell rising discontent among the millions of workers who have turned – violently in some cases – against capitalism?” – Joe Quinian, a strategist at the Bank of America.

“The capitalist global order was under attack even before the current crisis began, but the virulence against free enterprise has become more intense in the last year. And with the global economy in the midst of the deepest declines since the Great Depression, the backlash is bound to intensify.” (Financial Times, 05/12/09)

“Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”- John Maynard Keynes

Here’s Karl Marx in 1870, advising an activist friend in America about the Irish question:
England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.

Socialism Quotes

“All socialism involves slavery”. – Herbert Spencer

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor there see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” – John Steinbeck

Communism Quotes

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” – Brazilian bishop Dom Hélder Câmara